September 17, 2014 — So you have an entrepreneurial idea. Maybe it’s in production but needs improvement or perhaps it’s not yet ready for launch… The fact is your idea matters and it needs to be built. You could hire an agency, but that’s expensive – you could find a freelancer, but which option is best? Where do you find qualified leads? How do you approach your prospects? Make the hire? Manage & fire?

I will be talking about the best ways to find, hire, manage and even fire designers and developers in the wild-wild-west of the webernets. I will be speaking from both sides of the aisle as I am a designer/developer that has been hired to work on various projects, and I’ve managed projects driven by agencies and freelancers alike. It truly is the wild-wild-west, so let’s go gold diggin’ together.

September 16, 2014 — Organize your sites with Custom Post Types to handle speciality content (think staff, real estate listings, or design portfolio for starters). This presentation goes over how to write a simple plugin to handle the Custom Post Type creation and make sure that your work carries through from one theme change to the next.

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September 16, 2014 — Learn about how human-centered design can help improve your web designs. Inspiration, brainstorming, color theory, design terminology, typography and web usability will be discussed.

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September 15, 2014 — Numbers Used Once (NONCE) are important tools for developers. Many developers however don’t understand what they are or or how to properly use them. In this session we will take the red pill and dive headfirst into the rabbit hole.

When we emerge, you’ll know the tools available to you, both built-in and add-ons.

Join me for this enchanted journey, learn something new, refresh your knowledge, and groan at the bad jokes and tortured metaphors.

September 15, 2014 — When developing a theme for a client, it’s super easy to throw all of the new functions and hooks into the theme’s functions.php file, wipe your hands, congratulate yourself for a hard day’s work and go have a beer. But, after a while, have you stopped to see the size of that functions.php file? It can be massive! It’s easy to create a large disorganized functions.php file with so many tutorials out there giving you little tips and tricks on hooks and doodads that you can add to the site to make it fancy. “Ohh! Look at this code that changes my background color based on weather patterns! I’ll just… put this… right… here… *drops in functions.php file* This session is about why you don’t want to fill up your functions.php file, the proper way to add code to your site, and why it’s proper for readability, security and extendability.

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September 14, 2014 — Our focus will be beginning CSS. We’ll use Firefox Fire Bug to show non developers how to do simple things like changing styles, colors, and things like heading tags and different classes. I’ll show people how to target classes & ids, as well as how to make the changes in real time so they can see what it would like if the changes were enacted. I’ll also show how to access the Stylesheet so you can just copy & paste the CSS from Firebug into your Stylesheet or the JetPack Custom CSS.

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September 14, 2014 — Web accessibility (A11Y) is about making the web usable for people with disabilities, and it also benefits others with changing abilities, such as older people. Internationalization (I18N) and localization (L10N) are about translating web sites into other languages. UTF8 is a Unicode character set, which is now the dominant one used on the web, and it’s designed to include characters from just about every written language. Each of these topics are typically discussed in isolation from each other, but in this talk – after a gentle introduction to each of them – we’ll explore their interconnections. We’ll also take a look at what WordPress provides for supporting them in your work creating sites, themes, or plugins.

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September 12, 2014 — Learn how Vagrant, a tool for creating portable development environments, can help you:
– Easily setup a local development environment
– Match your local development environment to production and avoid surprises during deployment.
– Share development environments with team members and get new team members up and running in record time.
– Easily deploy code by using providers and provisioners.

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September 12, 2014 — In this lightning talk, I’ll offer you some tips and tricks to get better looking sites on mobile devices. I’ll also show you how you can use the mobble plugin to get completely different layouts on mobile devices.

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September 11, 2014 — It’s been a massive undertaking to migrate our CMS from an antiquated version of Expression Engine and moving over 40,000+ articles, images, tags, categories… etc. spanning almost 15 years. We’ll share our experience, challenges and difficulties we have over come during this process.

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